There is a discrepancy between what you want and what you are willing to change to experience what you want.  Shame, regret and fixed mind sets tend to get in the way of a growth mentality.  Listen to Matt explain how parents can be curious not furious about their teens’ behaviours.  Hear how to challenge people to think and behave differently to help them help themselves.  Brent and Matt discuss creating agency in kids and clients that tend to play the role of the victim and have trouble self-regulating in the face of a challenge.  

This podcast has 8 episodes available on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube and most major platforms - Click Here to visit the podcast website for links to each

Full Transcript:

Brent: What do you mean by toxic shame?

Matt: So—what is the function of shame? It's to identify, to you, that you've done something that is so bad it might require you to be out of the group. Or it might really affect your status within the group.

And notably, it's really different from embarrassment. Embarrassment is an emotion that evolved so we can see it on someone's face. But shame is a masked emotion. Like, you can notice someone look down and to the left, but basically when you're feeling shame, your urge is to not show that. But when you feel embarrassed, people can see you're embarrassed and they call you back in.

So a healthy shame is like: "I did something really bad, and I need to make amends for it." And it's not that I'm guilty and I feel bad about my behavior—I actually feel bad about myself.

Brent: Yeah. A lot of people end up having shame and just withdrawing, tied in with the anxious perception of themselves and feeling bad about themselves for unnecessary reasons. And then getting through this vicious cycle in their head...

Matt: That's the key.

Brent: ...when it's not necessarily based in reality, but you create this negative self-talk.

Matt: And the terrible irony of it is—because you're having the shame experience but you haven't done anything shameful—you now can't really feel shame when you should feel it. Because it's over-generalized. And you now feel ashamed when you do bad on a math test, or ashamed that you were awkward.

But actually, shame is there for like... "I deceived somebody." "I did something that really should not be done."

Brent: So what do you think is creating the unnecessary shame? Or inappropriate shame?

Matt: You might feel shame because you're not meeting a bunch of societal norms that are not really good norms. A norm would be like, "Everyone on Instagram looks like X." And so when I don't look like that, I think I'm shameful.

And then the irony is, say you treated your mom terribly—you actually might not feel the healthy shame about that behavior because you're saturated with shame.

Brent: Right. You see people that don't fit into social norms feel bad about themselves for it, even though they didn't do anything wrong. They just—square peg in a round hole, so they feel that they've done something wrong.

Matt: This happens all the time with autistic people in a quite interesting way. Where there are so many social norms they might not necessarily pick up quickly, that they feel ashamed about missing all of them.

But one of them might be really important. It might be really important to show appreciation and gratitude for the person who did something for you. And so because they feel bad about all elements of themselves, they don't have that healthy part that's like, "Ooh, am I actually caring about other people?"

And to be clear, when you tell a person on the spectrum, they are usually the most able to go, "Hmm, that's really interesting. Okay, I'm going to change my life today and now I'm going to always say thank you." They're more able to do it. But they never thought about the twenty things they feel ashamed of, and two of them are kind of shameful—or at least not good—and the other eighteen are just... you're neurodiverse, get over it. You're going to be weird.

That distinction is really hard. And especially if you're autistic, how are you going to figure that out? You basically need someone to tell you, "This one matters. Here's why."

"Oh my god, yeah, of course it does."

Brent: Yeah, interesting. They have a harder time, but they can more accessibly see how they're processing something. Whereas a lot of people, there's too many deep layers baked in for them to actually meaningfully try to change it.

Matt: Right.

Brent: Is that where the whole concept of ego comes in? Like, the difference between a neurodiverse autistic person versus a non-autistic person in terms of how their ego runs them?

Matt: Yeah. To be straightforward, definitely there are autists with incredibly destructive egos. But there's a huge part of neurodiverse autism where it's not actually even an egocentrism. It's just a self-oriented perspective. That absolutely can include other people, but it's much more cognitive than for someone whose empathy is all happening in the body.

So I would say that my average spectral student, or person, is a little more self-oriented, but they're also a little more other-oriented within that self-perspective. They think about other people.

Huge generalization. And it's very important to remember that neurodiverse people can be complete assholes. It would be discriminatory not to acknowledge that.

Brent: Absolutely. Every type of people, country, thing—everyone has their assholes.

Matt: It's not because you're autistic that you're an asshole, but it's not magical good power that means you could not possibly be.

So—how does that connect to regret? You hear all the time, "Live life with no regrets." And there's a really interesting perspective on that. Like... when you regret your past, but you love who you are today. That's kind of weird, right? I like my life and I like who I am, but I wish that my parents had done this differently. That I had gone to this other school. Even knowing that would have butterfly-effected you into something totally different.

So I kind of feel like the allergy to shame makes it hard to look in the past and go, "You know, I wish I had done this. I wish I had been aware of this earlier."

Brent: Yeah. I think the whole "I wish I could have" or "I should do this" is what gets people into traps. Particularly the "should" piece. And then if you didn't in the past, and you regret something, it's harping on something that you can't change or control.

Matt: Right. The "should" word... I think that's really deep.

I think you can identify the healthy regret I'm trying to get at by its feeling. Which is not panicked. I'm just going to try and interocept it. It's like a... wistful feeling. Like a, "Ah, damn" kind of energy. And not like, "Oh, I should have done that!"—which is such a tense energy.

I think some words to use are, "I think it would have been better if..." Or, "Yeah, I wish this had happened." And I think you're right, it's really unhealthy to be like, "I should have done this." And you can almost feel the anger towards the self in that case.

Brent: I think people need to be acknowledged and then redirected. It's okay to feel bad because, yeah, that was a bad choice. But how can you learn from that? That's where people that immediately default to shame have a hard time learning from mistakes. They just feel deeply bad about themselves for it.

You can kind of pull away from them and just do less and less.

Matt: And shame is a withdrawing emotion. That's its fundamental thing—is like, you better hide.

Brent: Imagine it's similar with trying to teach students as it is to people that have persistent or chronic pain. Where they are their own worst enemy because they get looped into those cycles. Try to build their trust and then help sort of redirect that shame, regret, or feeling that they should be doing something and that they just can never do it right.

Matt: And I think what is often missing there is empathy for the person who did the regretful choice. Which is you.

You're like, "I should never have done that." And then you've suddenly lost your connection to that kid or that young parent who was the one who did the wrong thing.

We had this talk at Christmas—my oldest kid kind of provoked it at the family dinner, it was really interesting. It was like: if you find yourself cringeworthy in the past, should you forget it? Should you divorce yourself from that person and be like, "I'm disgusted by that person who was obsessed with Transformers, because I'm not like that now"? Or should you love that old part of yourself?

I'm on number two for that. Love that part of yourself.

Brent: I think a lot of people that get stuck in those loops have a hard time appreciating that you can and do change and develop over time. They get stuck in a path that, "This is just who I am. This is the way I am and I can never change."

Matt: That's fascinating, because that's an intervention point for me with people. Which is—before we work out how you're going to change, I have to convince you that change is valid. And that you must change. And that if you think you won't change, you will just change badly.

There's research by this person, Carol Dweck, on Fixed versus Growth Mentality. And it's a huge predictor of success. And it's a huge reason gifted kids don't do well, is because people tell them they're smart, and then that's a fixed mentality, and they don't want to take any risks.

So you're getting at something deep. Sometimes you just tell someone in the first session, "Based on this, you're going to change like this, and change like this, and change like that. And let's do that." And they're on board. Other times it might take like six months or a year.

You're right that if you give any suggestions in that time, it will be inferred as, "You're saying I'm bad." "When you say that, that means I'm bad." So it's offensive.

Brent: There's a lot of nuance to try to find a way around a person not interpreting it that way. I've had a lot of experience with trying to navigate that. And a lot of times it's not worked.

So... alright, let's try coming at this a different way!

It takes an enormous amount of patience and persistence and gentle gloves to try to take people that are fixed into that mindset to try to teach them that it's learning and growing and developing and changing. Particularly teenagers, but also people that are adults and have been in this fixed place their whole life. You have to let some friends go—you've outgrown them or they've outgrown you—and sort of re-calibrate your environment is important.

Matt: But then we have this need for control. And anytime something changes in a way we didn't expect, especially if you're sensitive to a need for control, it's triggering. So there has to be some awareness of this process and that it is not always pleasant, but is genuinely inevitable.

Brent: Nailed it with the control piece. Because when people are anxious, their means of calming their anxiety is trying to be controlling. And keep yourself in a window of where you feel okay. But that gets very fixed and is hard for the other people around you to try to deal with you, which then creates conflict.

Matt: And it opens you up to systemic risk. This is something I learned in the book The Black Swan and also Nassim Taleb's following book Antifragile.

Basically, his main theory is: if you minimize change on a day-to-day basis, you set up an inevitable, huge, abrupt change. That will be disruptive on a level you will find very distressing—which, side note, is going to make you crave stability more, which is going to make you do that again, which is going to make something bad happen big again.

And the flip side, he says, is if you allow small negative things on a daily basis, you're much less likely to have all that pressure build up in the system. It sounds abstract, but it's like: I want to have everything about my job very certain. So I'm going to pick this company and this profession and this career path. And then the industry changes. And suddenly you're let go. And you have no options. Because your premise was that everything would be stable forever.

Brent: Yeah. It works until it doesn't. As opposed to being able to change with it.

That's why I tell people that hurt their back and they think the means to fixing their back is that they just need to make everything stronger. Some people—like, that helps. But it works until it doesn't. You turn yourself into a brick wall that resists—lots of things will bounce off it, but eventually something crushes it and shatters it.

You need to be a little bit more bendable and mobile and flexible, not just turn yourself into this rigid structure. Both physically and mentally. Being able to adapt. Everything in the world is changing, you need to be able to adapt to it.

Matt: And when you look in human history, it's like, well that's just been true over and over and over again. Suddenly there's electricity. Suddenly there's fire. Suddenly we have computers. It's the nature.

So, to the regret idea... for me it's mostly actually parents that need to deal with it. Because the thing that is the most protective for children in my experience is being able to talk about what has happened and what is happening in a way that's not super triggering. For anyone.

And when a parent feels a ton of shame over what's happened... and that can be so many things. One that I feel, that I've talked to with my kids, is I kept my oldest in the wrong school for a year too long. Twice. Two separate times. And like, that sucks. I'm an alternative educator, I'm supposed to have pulled them out faster.

To be honest, I don't feel a ton of shame, like I'm a bad person. But I do feel regret. And it's a conversation I have with them regularly. And we talk about what we were thinking at the time.

And I think what's hard for the parents I'm working with is they're so ashamed of what they did—even though sometimes it was egregious, sometimes it was not—but it didn't help their kid. And they don't want to have the conversation in the present because they don't want to re-trigger themselves. So I'm curious, what's a protocol for accessing regret that allows you to mend what went wrong, without anyone being a "bad person"? You know?

Brent: Yeah. Having somebody acknowledge that you made a bad decision in a non-judgmental way. And that you personally be willing to accept that you made a bad decision. That's where two people's interactions—particularly a parent and a child—is very challenging to do that.

Because I think particularly as parents of teenagers, you remember being that age. And it makes you reflect and think about what you went through. The choices your parents made. I think it automatically breeds a bit of resentment towards your parents. You could never possibly understand what your parent was going through at that time when they made the decision, and how different the world was at that time.

Matt: What I'm hoping is that they don't have that experience because we talked about it when it was happening, or right after it happened. And we don't leave it as a scar for our kids to discover later—"Oh, you guys fucked up." And then they're mad and resentful about it.

It's a conversation. And I hope/think that will make them better parents because they're going to have more understanding that parenting is not just like... you just apply the manual. You have dilemma after dilemma after dilemma. And when they work out bad, it feels bad. And that's actually a healthy thing to acknowledge.

Brent: We have a lot more different things to deal with as parents than in the past.

Matt: Exactly. And that your choices as a parent really matter.

Brent: Yes.

Matt: But the beauty of a regret—or... it's really just about talking to people.

Brent: It's not explicitly regret, but it is related to it in terms of where that regret cycle or the shame cycle goes in and pulling away. That's where it comes down to then motivation. People then get not motivated to do things differently or do anything at all.

Matt: Yes. Because of the withdrawal. You're in an attachment relationship. That's its fundamental thing. So if you can't ask your kid to make you feel better about what you regret... when you're going through a regret with a child, and that child is in an attachment relationship, you have to share it and then let whatever happens for them happen. Which could be quite emotionally intense. That's a hard part of it.

Brent: It's a tricky part about parenting side when your kids are changing and growing so quickly, too. That there's a feeling of need that you always have to do something for them. But actually choosing to not do something and waiting and letting time play it out...

Matt: Yeah. So I say to parents—but they have so much trouble with this—I say, "You don't need to keep it quiet. You just need to not coerce them. And you need to be curious about what they're experiencing."

So like... "I noticed you want to shave your head. What's that about?"

And not like, "You're gonna shave your head?!"

Or, "I'm not going to say anything and then he's going to shave his head and he'll learn in six months that he looks ridiculous."

But parents have so much trouble not turning that into, "Let me tell you what you're doing wrong, person." And so that's a really... "curious not furious" is a really hard but very useful strategy in those cases.

Brent: There's a fine line to walk between challenging with kids that revert quickly to shaming themselves or playing the victim role. Where if they can use it as a defense mechanism of, "I did something wrong, now I can go into pull-away kind of mode." That they... it's a manipulative way—that they don't necessarily realize it—to try to subvert that.

Matt: There is a piece where you're going to—especially the first time you try a new strategy—you're going to trigger your child, basically. And they're going to make a bunch of incorrect assumptions about what you are saying.

And you're going to have to take the—sometimes two hours—to work them through that feeling to, "I'm just sharing my opinion. I will support you even if you shave your head."

And it takes them a while to get to that contradictory state. Because that kind of defensive mentality is all about keeping one brain state active at once. "I'm great / I suck." "Dad's helping me / Dad's trying to persecute me."

And you have to get a mixed state which is like, "Dad has some thoughts. It's my life, and he's going to support me."

Brent: My job's interesting in that I'm dealing with adults more of the time. They're coming in with wanting some help with something physically. Sometimes they come in with the perception that they want me to just give them exercises or show them different things to do. But whether I'm showing them in a way that's motivated them to actually do it or not, or if they will actually do it...

Or, do they want me to just do something to them to try to make them feel better? And I hold the cards to be able to do both. And I have to try to get to know the person. Because you see some people that are quite anxious and they revert to feeling bad that they haven't done it right. Or if I show them how to do something differently and point out how they're not doing it properly, they immediately feel a bit bad about themselves.

So there's this little shame cycle. So I have to try to figure out... I have a half an hour with you right now. Is our time best spent me trying to make you feel better, even though it might be temporary? Or is it me showing you things you could do? Because that's what you think you want from me?

Matt: Do you ever bring it up with them? Like, "It looks like you feel bad about this," or something like that? "Don't feel bad about it, you're just changing the way you walk."

Brent: Yeah, I do all the time. The longer I've been doing this—I've been doing it over twenty years—I've gotten better at calling people on it earlier. As opposed to just, "Alright, you're here, I'll try to loosen something up on you and send you off." I'll call them on a bit of their own behavior patterns.

And so sometimes I only show people how to do exercises. Sometimes I only poke needles in them. And even though they might want the other thing, I kind of point out like, "Well, when you seem ready to actually hear me and look at changing something and not feel bad about that, then we'll get there."

Matt: Yep. I love that. I love doing that too. "I think you should do this. But if you're not going to do it, you have to tell me right now because you're wasting your money."

Brent: I'll have people sit and tell me a bit of their story of everything that hurts or this or that. And I've known them for a while, and they come in and then they kind of just stop talking. And I'm like, "Okay... so, what do you want to do?"

Matt: Yeah. Awesome.

Brent: And make them pause for a second, think. Because they're here, they've just vented at me for a bit. I'm like, "Okay, where are we going with this?"

Matt: That's where people need a bit of agency. It's making me think about my thesis and my research on self-regulation as a core thing that healthy people do. Actually, everyone self-regulates, but people who are happy self-regulate in a happy way.

And I think if venting doesn't lead to action, it's pretty toxic. Because it usually then just leads to more venting in the future. It comes back to what we were talking about before with growth mentality. If you have a fixed mentality, it's like, "I feel bad. I need to minimize this feeling because nothing will ever change." Whereas the other one is like, "I feel bad. I need to feel this feeling so I know what to change."

Brent: Yeah. I think there's a lot of discrepancy in people that kind of acknowledge that they should or need or want to do something differently, but aren't really at a place where they're able or willing to do something differently.

Matt: And maybe it's because they've chosen the "suffering" choice. So they're like, "I should go to the gym every day." And really the should is like, "I should move my body." Or something like that. So then you can just be like, "Hey, if you hate going to the gym, don't pick that."

And that simple thing suddenly makes it from "I should be so better and perfect" to "I should go outside today maybe for a minute." Or something they can handle.

Brent: Yeah. You gotta remove some of the barriers to entry and challenge people's negative thought loops that are in their... help them really see that that's in their head. That just because you think it doesn't make it true.

Matt: And that your perception of yourself as a fixed entity is just a perception that's doing something for you—letting you not change.

You know, I was just having this realization. So there's a theory called the Dunning-Kruger Effect. That's like, the better you are at something, the more you know you don't know about it. And when you're new at something, you're natively bad at it.

And I'm realizing that people with a fixed mentality, they've had so much less practice changing, that they have a naive mentality that it involves incredible suffering, Herculean efforts, doing the thing you hate that you've been avoiding your whole life... instead of just like, twisting this knob by one unit and seeing what happens.

Brent: Yeah. They're so used to being in this narrow tunnel that, yeah, they'll get caught in a loop of doing a hundred and fifty percent all the time. And it's exhausting. And they're blowing up. If they then feel like you're asking them to do anything, it's like you're asking them to do more.

And I'm like, "No. Not more. Different. Different is hard."

Matt: I had a student recently say, "I did well because I tried so hard." I was like, "Student, you've tried hard for the last five years I've known you. That's not what changed. What changed is you worked smarter and more calmly."

And like, that was the difference. Of course you did work hard—you always work hard. It's not only how good a kid you are or how hard you try, but actually matters how you engage. In a technical way.

But when the person who we're talking about does decide to change, they almost always try to hire a professional who will fix everything. So maybe they go for this all-or-one system, but they're not taking any role for agency.

Brent: The people that tilt more on the anxious side get really stuck in their own head, but then have this external locus of control where "everyone else is doing this to me." But they don't actually understand at all what all the other people are also going through.

Matt: That brings me to one last thought—but we've been on a great journey here, lots of connections I didn't think of. So, tangentially related, for autistic people who can struggle with the rules and sometimes need to figure out which rules matter and which rules they can make themselves up...

I'm thinking about this idea—I don't know if it's an app or a course—called "Normy Manners." That explains the manners of society and different cultures and different ways of being in society. And explains the logic behind them.

One thing I've had a few autistic students not understand over the year is: if you go to someone's house for dinner and the dinner is gross, and they say, "How was dinner?"—do you say "It was gross"? Or do you say "It was good"?

And there is a polite way to not fully lie, but say something. But you have to think about the problem first. And you have to understand why you would show appreciation for dinner even if you didn't like it. Like, all of these things have to be reckoned with.

So I'm thinking about building a little course that explains, in logical terms, why social conventions exist. And then offers like a variety of options that you can do that are going to make society work for you. And then points out that if you just go like, "No, I fucking hated it," you're not going to ever get invited back to that person's house. And helps you understand the difference as a way of letting people have agency.

Brent: Yeah. That's interesting. I feel like there needs to be a dichotomous, comparable-but-opposite app of how to explain everything 100% emotionally. For people that only understand logic. Trying to use logic with people that are just purely emotional—and it just sort of are very black and white and do the sort of compartmentalized things—you need the emotional explanation and the logical explanation.

Matt: Yes! Fucking eh, Brent. Yes. This is brilliant.

Yeah, sometimes even the autistic people need that side because they're like... have both sides. They're just not very well connected. And of course I'm thinking about all kinds of mental health issues that require that.

So I think in that case, there would be a key thing of helping the person feel both elements of a black-or-white feeling at the same time. And that would be the deliverable.

Brent: Yeah, that's a big deliverable. I think it's very challenging to help very people that just are splitting everything to find some level of gray area.

Matt: And my gut feeling is some of those people are going to need mental health support because of the app. Because the app will like, trigger a dissonance they're not ready for. And then... yeah. So that one's a little riskier maybe. But very interesting.

This podcast has 8 episodes available on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube and most major platforms - Click Here to visit the podcast website for links to each